Reviews
It has been about two months since NVIDIA officially unveiled their first pair of DirectX 11 graphics cards based on the highly anticipated Fermi architecture, the flagship GeForce GTX 480 and the GeForce GTX 470. As is typically the case, when NVIDIA--or ATI for that matter-- releases a new high-end GPU, lower-end, more affordable derivatives...
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Once upon a time, not very long ago in fact, Intel vehemently frowned upon overclocking. There were even times leading up to new processor and chipset releases when it was rumored that Intel would bring an end to overclocking altogether. Thankfully, the rumors of overclocking's death were greatly exaggerated and we enthusiasts continue to...
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The original Drobo direct-attached-storage (DAS) device hit the scene in summer of 2007 and took the tech world by storm. It represented a new paradigm in how you could implement external, redundant back-up storage with much of the same goodness that RAID offers, but without a number of the headaches and the complexity that also comes with...
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Solid State Drives are all the rage with PC Enthusiasts these days. Although relatively expensive in comparison to standard hard drives, Solid State Drives have gotten very popular and have earned a reputation as one of the most significant performance upgrades available to enhance general system responsiveness. Capacities are relatively low...
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When it comes to the business of building PCs, true innovation is hard to find. There are exceptions—HP had the Blackbird 002, Alienware designs its own enclosures, and there's always the Thermaltake Level 10—but most companies aren't willing to take the financial risk that's part and parcel of designing new and different products....
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Nettop PCs are sort of a re-purposing of a product category that was popularized in the business world, formerly known as "thin clients." Though thin client PCs are relatively "dumb" machines that rely on enterprise intranet services and servers to run applications, nettops need to have a bit more capability and operate autonomously. ...
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There are two main types of road warriors in this world. First, there are the ones who value portability over all else. These users are more concerned with battery life and ease of transportation than they are with raw performance, and it's because of them that netbooks -- the very epitome of portability -- have become such a popular...
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One of the fun things about being a hardware analyst is that every now and then, research and comparison between products turns up something both interesting and unexpected. In this case, we were testing and comparing image quality between ATI's 5970 and the GeForce GTX 480 as part of a system review when we stumbled across an officially...
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Touted as one of the biggest milestones in Windows games development in recent years, DirectX 10 ultimately didn't live up to the hype as far as end-users were concerned. A large part of the disappointment was perhaps due to a misunderstanding of what DirectX 10 was supposed to be. DirectX 10 was a fundamental refresh of the entire API and...
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We are officially declaring May 11, 2010 "Athlon II" day. Why you ask? Because AMD is launching a total of six new Athlon II processors today, including a new flagship model, targeted squarely at budget conscious consumers. We should point out, however, that all six of the processors launching today feature existing core microarchitectures....
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Earlier this week, we covered news that a California PS3 owner, Anthony Ventura, had filed a class action lawsuit against Sony, alleging that the company's decision to terminate the PS3's Linux support via firmware update constituted a false/deceptive marketing practice.While most PS3 owners never took advantage of the system's Linux capabilities,...
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Enthusiasts are passionate about their hardware. While mainstream consumers target products with the best price to performance ratio, there is still a strong market for computer components that hold nothing back. For proof, look no further than Intel's latest Extreme Edition 980X processor, sporting six cores and twelve threads of pure awesome....
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A little over two years ago, Intel formally unveiled the low-power Atom processor and its related chipset and platform technologies. At the time, Intel's vision for Atom had the diminutive CPU powering a diverse line-up of mobile internet devices, or MIDs, web-connected tablets, portable media players, and handheld gaming devices. Suffice...
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Last year, Toshiba announced the Satellite T135 series, a line of thin-and-light ultraportable laptops that offered a good balance of performance and price. Toshiba got our attention with this line so we reviewed the Satellite T135-S1310RD, an Intel Pentium SU4100 powered machine that featured an ultra-low voltage processor. At a time when...
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When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad at a frenzied event in California this past January, he said something interesting. It was a statement that got many in the tech industry thinking. Now that we have played with the company's first tablet for a couple of weeks, we think it's time to really take a look at how reasonable Jobs' statement...
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Let's face the facts; unless you have an automatic backup configured, you probably don't back up the information on your computer as often as you should. Even though we would hate to lose critical financial documents, personal photos, music, and movies, we don't often take the time to ensure that these files are safely and securely stored...
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Way back in November of 2007, AMD unveiled all of the components of the "Spider" platform, which consisted of a Phenom processor, 700-series chipset-based motherboard, and Radeon HD 3800 series graphics. A little over a year later, in January of 2009, AMD completed a refresh of their total platform and dubbed it "Dragon". Similarly, the Dragon...
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While we tend to get worked up into a frenzy over the latest DX11 graphics cards and get deep into the latest multi-core processor releases, displays get comparatively little bandwidth here. Maybe it's because it is much more difficult to definitively quantify which monitor is better than another using a standard benchmark....
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Lenovo's IdeaPad line is somewhat unpredictable. In our estimation, it's the company's "fun" line of products; in other words, it's the range of notebooks that they can tinker with, while the ThinkPad caters to business-class users. The IdeaPad S10 line of netbooks has been going for a few years now, obviously with a good deal of success....
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When the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series was first introduced a few months back, all of AMD's add in board partners offered essentially the same products, at least at the hardware level. The various boards available during the 'first wave' of Radeon HD 5800 series availability shipped with different accessory bundles and usually had custom decals...
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Lately, it feels like the good, old, reliable hard disk drive (HDD) doesn't get any respect. When it comes to storage, Solid State Drives (SSDs) are getting all the attention these days--and it's no wonder, considering the speed, durability, low-power, and silent-running attributes of current solid state drives. But SSDs are also very expensive...
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Apple's iPad has left an indelible mark on the Tablet PC universe. It wasn't that long ago when just about everyone gave up on the tablet. Just about every notebook manufacturer in existence tried their hand at making a tablet at one point or another, and just about everyone hung it up by 2005. For whatever reasons, tablets never managed to...
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